Moderate? Conservative? With Gerald Ford, Take Your Pick

DIFFERENT VOICES President Ford with top members of his foreign policy team in May 1975: counterclockwise from top, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert McFarlane and Brent Scowcroft.Credit
David Hume Kennerly/The White House

The last three former presidents to die dominated the world stage. They bent history to their will, for better or worse, and became the subjects of a crowded shelf of biographies. For the writers of memorials and obituaries, they were easy.

Not so Gerald R. Ford, who served only 29 months, never won a national election, and was constricted by an overwhelmingly hostile Congress. He is remembered mainly for the pardon of his predecessor, an act that ultimately doomed his bid for re-election.

Yet the public ritual surrounding the death of a former president demands a period of public rumination, and partisans across the political spectrum have been finding substance to admire in Mr. Ford.

There are, of course, the common sentiments that he was a decent, humble, calming leader at a precarious time. But peering back at his modest and often overlooked legacy many have also found elements in concert with their own views, variously honoring him as an icon of moderate Republicanism, a conservative budget hawk, an accidental apostle of Reaganism, a critic of the Iraq war and a proponent of gay rights.

“You can pick and choose,” said Richard Norton Smith, the historian and former director of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum. “The Ford presidency is a very good example of how history is argument without end, and the thing is, that we haven’t had this argument until recently because we are so mesmerized by Nixon. Historians have always tended to look at the Ford presidency as a kind of coda, the un-expired Nixon term.”

For those who never thought highly of him, the change in tone was striking. An online column last week in the left-leaning Nation magazine, which railed against Mr. Ford’s pardon of former President Nixon, commended President Bush for being “appropriately respectful” toward Mr. Ford.

The column urged Mr. Bush to heed Mr. Ford’s criticism of the Iraq war, made during a 2004 interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post reported after the former president’s death. “I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security,” Mr. Ford was quoted as saying.

In television coverage of his death, the Iraq war comments soon received as much attention as anything he did in office. “He was atrocious at P.R. when he was president, but getting the Woodward interview released after his death was a pretty savvy P.R. move on Ford’s part,” said Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic, who added that the magazine did not plan any Ford coverage because of a holiday printing schedule. “I don’t exactly consider it the most momentous event in the history of the republic.”

The conservative National Review has scorned Mr. Ford for 30 years as the wishy-washy establishment Republican who beat back Mr. Reagan’s conservative 1976 primary challenge. Conservatives disdained Mr. Ford for what they considered his too tolerant approach to the Soviet Union and for naming Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president.

But on the National Review’s Web site last week several conservatives stretched to admire their former bête noire. Some praised Mr. Ford for at least trying to veto 66 Democratic bills, even though the Democratic majority in Congress usually overrode them. Paul Kengor, a professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, credited Mr. Ford with “paving the way for Reagan” by “giving détente a chance, and thus an opportunity to show its true colors.” And Lee Edwards, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, thanked Mr. Ford for nominating Mr. Rockefeller because it infuriated conservatives into forming the New Right.

“It’s like congratulating the Soviets for the Marshall Plan,” Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor at the National Review, said in an interview. “In fairness to Ford,” he added, looking for praise, “I have never seen him on a list of the worst presidents.”

Socially moderate Republicans, in contrast, have embraced President Ford in death as the champion of their vision of the party. “Jerry believed this party was about a right to be left alone,” said former Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a friend of Mr. Ford’s, arguing that the Republicans’ losses in the last election sent a message to return to smaller government and stop emphasizing social issues like abortion restrictions.

After Mr. Ford died, Charles Francis, a friend of President Bush who founded a group to welcome gay voters in the Republican Party, circulated a private letter from Mr. Ford supporting gay rights. Mr. Ford eventually decided to join the group and publicly supported legally recognizing gay unions. The Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay Republicans, called Mr. Ford “a great man” who will be remembered “for acting as a force for tolerance.”

There was a time, shortly after President Bush’s election in 2000, when some of his critics murmured that he was bringing back the Ford White House, noting the return of three prominent veterans of the Ford administration: Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill.

Six years ago, David Frum, a former Bush speech writer, leapt to the president’s defense, arguing in The Weekly Standard that the administration’s philosophy and personnel drew more heavily from the Reagan White House. “Ford was not a success in office,” Mr. Frum wrote, repeating the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman’s observation that Ford’s destiny was “to vex generations of schoolchildren yet unborn with the question whether it was he or Martin Van Buren who fought the French and Indian War.”

In an interview last week, however, Mr. Frum offered a more sympathetic appraisal, describing Mr. Ford as essentially a Reaganite in fiscal matters and noting that he appointed Alan Greenspan to head his Council of Economic Advisers. “It is very hard to be a great president when the opposition party has not only two-thirds of the votes in Congress but is on an ideological binge,” Mr. Frum said.

The liberal American Prospect chose to highlight another influential Ford decision — his nomination of John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court — when it posted an article on its Web site last week that its editor Harold Meyerson wrote last summer. Mr. Meyerson noted that it was Justice Stevens who wrote both the dissent in Bush v. Gore, the case that put Mr. Bush in the White House, and the majority opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case that rejected the Bush administration’s use of military tribunals or torture to handle military detainees.

“Ford is one lucky former president, that Stevens, in his mid-80s, has emerged as the leading voice and most effective force in defense of the American democratic system,” Mr. Meyerson wrote. “Instead of just having a forgettable presidency and bequeathing the nation two of the most dangerous thugs ever to hold high office,” he continued, referring to Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Ford’s legacy “is at least self-negating.”

Historians say it is misleading to judge President Ford by any of the standards of contemporary politics since he operated in a very different context, before the rise of supply-side arguments about tax cuts, social issues like abortion or gay rights, or the rise of radical Islamic terrorism. What is now called “moderate” was then called “establishment” in the Republic Party.

Mr. Smith, the former director of the Ford library and now head of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, said President Ford was an old school limited-government conservative: “He didn’t want government in the classroom, he didn’t want it in the board room, and he didn’t want it in the bedroom.”

In some ways, Mr. Brookhiser of the National Review said, the efforts to memorialize the Ford presidency recall the challenges caricaturists once faced drawing his plain, handsome, even-featured face. “He was the hardest president for cartoonists.”

Correction: January 7, 2007

An article last week about different interpretations of the presidency of Gerald R. Ford from across the political spectrum misstated the frequency with which Congress overrode his vetoes. Mr. Ford used his veto power 66 times and his vetoes were overridden 12 times. His vetoes were not “usually overriden.”

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